A discussion on privacy yielded a sharp response from Association of National Advertisers chief Bob Liodice at yesterday's final day of the 4A's agency conference in Austin, Texas. In a panel moderated by Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen, the sentiment was that self-regulation was somewhat well-received by the FTC -but it's tempered by what Liodice sees as the FTC's lack of "a workable definition of tracking." Read about it. In another panel, CEO John Wren of Omnicom Group, CEO Michael Roth of Interpublic and CEO Martin Sorrell of WPP Group discussed the state of the agency (and holding company) in front of the agency masses. According to Statesman.com's Brian Gaar, "Much of the discussion centered around the need for the industry to attract and retain talent. An industry survey found that 30 percent of respondents said they planned to leave their job in the next 12 months." Garr quotes Sorrell as saying that there there is a "critical neglect" when it comes to recruiting in the agency world. Read more. And in Brandweek.

Adobe Unwraps Demdex, Partners - Targets?

At this week's Omniture Summit, and after acquiring Demdex in January, Adobe officially integrated Demdex into its Omniture Online Marketing Suite by adding it to its optimization layer of products. According to a release, Adobe's Omniture unit also welcomed a cavalcade of new Demdex ecosystem partners including data providers, demand-side platforms and ad servers and video networks. See who... here. Is there another Adobe acquisition target among them? Time will tell.

MediaMath Adds Funds

A new SEC filing appears to indicate that demand-side platform MediaMath has raised another round of financing this past February to the tune of $9 million with a remaining $5 million of equity potentially still to be sold. See it. TechCrunch claims an announcement of MediaMath's "$14 million Series B round" is imminent. Read more.

The Shiny New Toy

The New York Times' Jessica Bruder covers one of the hot-new-publisher-revenue-streams of the moment: Group buying led by GroupOn. It's raging ecosystem is very similar to that of display. Bruder identifies the GroupOn copycats as follows: "Most of the companies grabbing at Groupon’s coattails do not have a vast subscriber base or millions of dollars. Instead, they are relying on a strategy called fast following — the idea that copying a blockbuster start-up yields fewer risks and potentially great rewards." Meow! Read more. Just in time for group buying fever, legendary DoubleClick executive David Rosenblatt and friends are taking the wraps off of Group Commerce. All Things D's Tricia Duryee has the interview.

Preventing The Fraudulent

Fresh off of last week's acquisition of Adometry and name change (from Click Forensics to Adometry), the company has announced a partnership with the BrightRoll Network and BrightRoll Exchange (BRX). According to the release, the goal is "to identify and eliminate invalid or potentially fraudulent click behavior that increases advertiser fees" which helps with improved campaign performance. Read the release.

Malvertising Looming Larger

Online security firm Dasient reports on its company blog that according to its stats, Q4 2010 was a banner year for malvertising! - no pun intended. From the Dasient blog: "Based on our Q4 estimates, three (3) million malvertising impressions were served per day, an increase of 100% as compared to 1.5 million malvertising impressions per day in Q3 2010." Read more about display malfeisance.

Are Futures The Future?

Doug Weaver returns to Upstream Group's "Get The Drift" blog and wonders skeptically, "...as holding company leaders hold forth about process efficiency, automated audience buying, Wall Street level trading of 'ad futures,' I wonder if those who manage and run brands and marketing budgets obsess about the same things?" Read more.

DMP Adds To Analytics

Data management platform Aggregate Knowledge announced it has releasd a new analytics reporting suite which it says combines audience profiles "with impression-level campaign data to generate actionable insights into exactly what (creative), where (inventory/placement), and who (audience profiles) is driving the best performance." Read more.

The Brand Genome

Demand-side platform DataXu claims that its audience buying platform doesn't need to use cookies to track audiences (but it adds it still uses cookies to "count ad placements and measure effectiveness) according to a release. Instead, the company says it uses what it calls the "'Brand Genome,' [which] decides who, what, where, and when ad placements will generate the best performance." Is "brand genome" the new "data leakage"? Read the release... you know you want to.

Data-Driven Product

On VentureBeat, CEO Niel Robertson of PPC marketplace company Trada has taken to his quill again and written a piece on how product development will become even more data-driven. The problem can be deciding what to measure as he echoes John Wanamaker's famous "half" quote: "You simply don’t know which metrics truly represent your users’ experience until you start mining data. As you examine results, you’ll start to get a better picture of what matters and what doesn’t." Read it.

Ad Stack Talk

On his personal blog, Dominic Tassone warns against what he calls buying the "Ad Technology Stack" versus an a la carte approach. He argues, "Technology stack buyers must balance the fear of being left-behind with a more reasoned approach. Sellers must be able to provide value today without depending on technology lock-in to be successful in the long-term..." Read more.

Ads Safe

Kara Swisher reports that today Aol will let some 400 staffers go as it looks to further streamline the company's efforts -but no one from the ad teams will be part of this round of layoffs. "Sources said there will be no staffers let go in its network group or advertising sales unit, but editorial and other media product groups will be impacted." Read more.